A Clockwork Orange

Wed April 5, 2017, 7:30 PM

The head of a gang of toughs, in an insensitive futuristic society, is conditioned to become physically ill at sex and violence during a prison sentence. When he is released, he's brutally beaten by all of his old adversaries.

There's Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange," and then there's
everything else. Kubrick's 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess's
complex literary satire of crime and punishment is an
earth-shattering cinematic experience that elicits an
unprecedented visceral response from its audience. Malcolm
McDowell plays British thug and sociopath Alex De Large, who
wanders around a futuristic, economically ravished Britain where
trash fills the streets. It’s a spitting image of the bleak
socio-political landscape that gave rise to the British punk rock
movement of the late ‘70s.

Alex lends friendly narration to the audience that he calls
"brothers" as he incites violence with a band of delinquent
misfits (called "droogs") at his command. Alex gets imprisoned
after viciously raping and murdering an upper-class woman in her
home with a large plastic phallus intended as an ironic piece of
modern art.

Kubrick’s sense of visual irony is spectacular. Rather than go to
prison Alex opts to undergo a torturous rehabilitation therapy
(the "Ludovico technique"), involving forced viewings of Nazi war
films accompanied by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. A scene involving
Alex being "cured" with clamps holding his eyelids open, presents
a fierce artistically infused portrait of torture. The proven
effects of the treatment lead to Alex's release into a society
where he is repeatedly punished for his past transgressions until
he isn't.

"A Clockwork Orange" proved a crucial touchstone for significant
cultural shifts in music and film. '70s era filmmakers like
Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese were liberated by Kubrick's
visionary approach to style, form, and subject matter. As well,
many aspects of the punk rock movement are directly attributable
to it. The film is intoxicating in its use of atmosphere, music,
and paradox to excite and inform the viewer's imagination at a
palpitating tempo. Everything comes as a surprise for the
voyeuristic spectator who is implicated in every criminal act of
citizen and state. We are all victim, killer, police, and
legislator. Sleep on that.